Search results for ""author william faulkner""

Gavin Stevens, the wise student of crime and folkways of Mississippi's Yoknapatawpha county, plays the major role in these six stories of violence.

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The death and burial of Addie Bundren is told by members of her family, as they cart the coffin to Jefferson, Mississippi, to bury her among her people. And as the intense desires, fears and rivalries of the family are revealed in the vernacular of the Deep South, Faulkner presents a portrait of extraordinary power - as epic as the Old Testament, as American as Huckleberry Finn.

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This postbellum Greek tragedy is the perfect introduction to Faulkner’s elaborate descriptive syntax.Quentin Compson and Shreve, his Harvard roommate, are obsessed with the tragic rise and fall of Thomas Sutpen. As a poor white boy, Sutpen was turned away from a plantation owner's mansion by a black butler. From then on, he was determined to force his way into the upper echelons of Southern society. His relentless will ensures his ambitions are soon realised; land, marriage, children, his own troop to fight in the Civil War... but Sutpen returns from the conflict to find his estate in ruins and his family collapsing. Secrets from his own past threaten to ruin the lives of his children and destroy everything he has worked for.

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'Between grief and nothing I will take grief'In New Orleans in 1937, a man and woman embark on a headlong flight into the wilderness of illicit passion, fleeing her husband and the temptations of respectability. In Mississippi ten years earlier, a convict sets forth across a flooded river, risking his one chance at freedom to rescue a pregnant woman. From these separate stories Faulkner composes a symphony of deliverance and damnation, survival and self-sacrifice, a novel in which elemental danger is juxtaposed with fatal injuries of the spirit.

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A group of soldiers travel by train across the United States in the aftermath of the First World War. One of them is horribly scarred, blind and almost entirely mute. Moved by his condition, a few civilian fellow travellers decided to see him home to Georgia, to a family who believed him dead, and a fiancée who grew tired of waiting. Faulkner's first novel deals powerfully with lives blighted by war.

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In 1925 William Faulkner began his professional writing career in earnest while living in the French Quarter of New Orleans. He had published a volume of poetry (The Marble Faun), had written a few book reviews, and had contributed sketches to the University of Mississippi student newspaper. He had served a stint in the Royal Canadian Air Corps and while working in a New Haven bookstore had become acquainted with the wife of the writer Sherwood Anderson.In his first six months in New Orleans, where the Andersons were living, Faulkner made his initial foray into serious fiction writing. Here in one volume are the pieces he wrote while in the French Quarter. These were published locally in the Times-Picayune and in the Double Dealer.The pieces in New Orleans Sketches broadcast seeds that would take root in later works. In their themes and motifs these sketches and stories foreshadow the intense personal vision and style that would characterize Faulkner's mature fiction. As his sketches take on parallels with Christian liturgy and as they portray such characters as an idiot boy similar to Benjy Compson, they reveal evidence of his early literary sophistication.In praise of New Orleans Sketches, Alfred Kazin wrote in the New York Times Book Review that ""the interesting thing for us now, who can see in this book the outline of the writer Faulkner was to become, is that before he had published his first novel he had already determined certain main themes in his work.""In his trailblazing introduction, Carvel Collins often called ""Faulkner's best-informed critic,"" illuminates the period when the sketches were written as the time that Faulkner was making the transition from poet to novelist.""For the reader of Faulkner,"" Paul Engle wrote in the Chicago Tribune, ""the book is indispensable. Its brilliant introduction . . . is full both of helpful information . . . and of fine insights."" ""We gain something more than a glimpse of the mind of a young genius asserting his power against a partially indifferent environment,"" states the Book Exchange (London). ""The long introduction . . . must rank as a major literary contribution to our knowledge of an outstanding writer: perhaps the greatest of our times.""

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A complex, intense American novel of family from the winner of the Nobel Prize for LiteratureWith an introduction by Richard HughesEver since the first furore was created on its publication in 1929, The Sound and the Fury has been considered one of the key novels of this century. Depicting the gradual disintegration of the Compson family through four fractured narratives, the novel explores intense, passionate family relationships where there is no love, only self-centredness. At its heart, this is a novel about lovelessness - 'only an idiot has no grief; only a fool would forget it. What else is there in this world sharp enough to stick to your guts?'

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This Norton Critical Edition is based on the 1985 corrected text and is accompanied by newly updated and expanded explanatory annotations and an introduction by Michael Gorra. “Backgrounds and Contexts” is divided into three sections, each of which includes a concise introduction by Michael Gorra that carefully frames the issues presented, with particular attention to As I Lay Dying’s place in Faulkner’s literary life. “Contemporary Reception” includes a selection of seven reviews, including those by Julia K. W. Baker, Henry Nash Smith, and Valery Larbaud. “The Writer and His Work” examines Faulkner’s own claims regarding the composition of the novel and his changing opinions over time, sample pages from the manuscript, his Nobel Prize address, and additional writings by Faulkner on Yoknapatawpha County. “Cultural Context” reprints seven essays and advertisements—three selections new to the Second Edition—along with other materials that address questions of Southern motherhood, Agrarianism, and the Southern grotesque. “Criticism” begins with the editor’s introduction to As I Lay Dying’s critical history and scholarly reception. Eleven critical essays are included—five new to the Second Edition—by Olga W. Vickery, Cleanth Brooks, Eric Sundquist, Doreen Fowler, Dorothy J. Hale, Patrick O’Donnell, John T. Matthews, John Limon, Richard Godden, Susan Scott Parrish, and Erin E. Edwards. A chronology and a selected bibliography are also included.

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William Faulkner’s provocative and enigmatic 1929 novel, The Sound and the Fury, is widely acknowledged as one of the most important English-language novels of the twentieth century. This revised and expanded Norton Critical Edition builds on the strengths of its predecessors while focusing new attention on both the novel’s contemporary reception and its rich cultural and historical contexts. The text for the Third Edition is again that of the corrected text scrupulously prepared by Noel Polk, whose textual note precedes the novel. David Minter’s annotations, designed to assist readers with obscure words and allusions, have been retained. “Contemporary Reception,” new to the Third Edition, considers the broad range of reactions to Faulkner’s extraordinary novel on publication. Michael Gorra’s headnote sets the stage for assessments by Evelyn Scott, Henry Nash Smith, Clifton P. Fadiman, Dudley Fitts, Richard Hughes, and Edward Crickmay. New materials by Faulkner (“The Writer and His Work”) include letters to Malcolm Cowley about The Portable Faulkner and Faulkner’s Nobel Prize for Literature address. “Cultural and Historical Contexts” begins with Michael Gorra’s insightful headnote, which is followed by seven seminal considerations—five of them new to the Third Edition—of southern history, literature, and memory. Together, these works—by C. Vann Woodward, Richard H. King, Richard Gray, William Alexander Percy, Lillian Smith, William James, and Henri Bergson—provide readers with important contexts for understanding the novel. “Criticism” represents eighty-five years of scholarly engagement with The Sound and the Fury. New to the Third Edition are essays by Eric Sundquist, Noel Polk, Doreen Fowler, Richard Godden, Stacy Burton, and Maria Truchan-Tataryn. A Chronology of Faulkner’s life and work is newly included along with an updated Selected Bibliography.

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This Norton Critical Edition includes: The authoritative text of Light in August, established by Noel Polk in 1985 and accompanied by Melanie Benson Taylor’s preface and explanatory footnotes. A rich selection of background and contextual materials, thoughtfully and practically arranged to draw readers into the American South of Faulkner’s imagination. Topics include “The Writer’s World and Words”, “Reception and Influence”, and “Historical and Cultural Contexts”. Thirteen critical essays on the novel’s major themes. A chronology and a selected bibliography. About the Series Read by more than 12 million students over fifty-five years, Norton Critical Editions set the standard for apparatus that is right for undergraduate readers. The three-part format—annotated text, contexts and criticism—helps students to better understand, analyse and appreciate the literature, while opening a wide range of teaching possibilities for instructors. Whether in print or in digital format, Norton Critical Editions provide all the resources students need.

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This Norton Critical Edition includes: The authoritative text of Absalom, Absalom!, established by Noel Polk in 1986 and accompanied by Susan Scott Parrish’s introduction and explanatory footnotes. Two maps and five other images. A rich selection of background and contextual materials carefully arranged to draw readers into the American South of William Faulkner’s imagination. Topics include “Contemporary Reception,” “The Writer and His Work,” and “Historical Contexts.” Seventeen critical essays on the novel’s major themes, from classic literary critiques to recent scholarship on, among other topics, race, gender, and the environment. A chronology and a selected bibliography.

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